Designing more than a service

Homelessness is a difficult experience many of us cannot fathom.

This past weekend, the City of Austin Innovation Team and Service Design ATX Meetup group hosted the Service Hustle for Homelessness, a three-day co-creation workshop with volunteer design professionals and people with lived homelessness experience in their present or past.After Friday’s dinner of catered barbecue and a round of co-creation on key issues, groups formed around top ideas; I joined the team using the starter idea of “storage leveraging the city’s unused spaces.”

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Four strategic design lessons on the eve of graduation

(originally published on Medium)

In a few short weeks, I will finish my master’s program at Parsons in Strategic Design + Management within the School of Design Studies. This is a blended “design methodologies with business applications” program, one of the first and few in the nation. Each class has stretched the traditional business courses — for example, instead of business economics, we took a current, broader approach and studied new economies (e.g. the gig economy) and global trends and impacts. 
 
This program wraps up in a year-long capstone project, in which we each select and solve for one wicked challenge. Through this process, several concepts I learned moved from class discussion topics to personal lessons.

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